Author Articleshttp://mentalfloss.com/author-articles/12129
enHow the World's Greatest Game Designer Designs Gameshttp://mentalfloss.com/article/26896/how-worlds-greatest-game-designer-designs-games
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/reiner_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>If you like board games, you've probably run into one designed by Reiner Knizia. Knizia is probably the most prolific designer of games working today, one of the few who designs games full-time, and has a number of extremely successful titles to his credit. Among the hundreds of games he has designed are my favorite two-player card game, Lost Cities, <a href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/?p=1386">which I reviewed</a> in July); its board game analog Keltis (which won the Spiel des Jahres award as game of the year in 2008); the 2001 game adaptation of Lord of the Rings; and hardcore gamer favorite Tigris and Euphrates. That last is one of four Knizia games to win the Deutscher Spiele Preis, another game-of-the-year award generally given to a more complex game than the one honored by the Spiel des Jahres, and those four wins give Knizia almost one of every five Deutscher Spiele Preise given in the award's twenty-one year history. I spoke to Dr. Knizia in early December to ask about his process and philosophy of board game design. [Image credit: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Essen08_-_Reiner_Knizia_1.jpg">Mat?j Ba?ha</a>.]</p>
<p>Knizia has been designing games for a living since 1997, when he quit his job as operations director for a 300-person mortgage company in England, although he says he's been designing games since he was a child. My thought was that the hardest part in designing that many games – Wikipedia has Knizia's published total over 500 – would be conception, but Knizia says that's not the case. “I think it's not very difficult to have good ideas. We have plenty of ideas floating around; the real challenge is really to develop these ideas into excellent games – and that is a very long process. Of course you have to start out with the right idea, and you have to have a good selection process to decide which one can we bring into a perfect product.” </p>
<!--more--><p>Knizia himself is a very process-oriented designer, moving quickly to prototype from initial concept and play-testing frequently with multiple groups of testers. “The lifeblood of design is testing, then refining,” according to Knizia. “The changes are quite radical early; then it becomes more fine tuning. That's the normal cycle of developing a design.” The testers offer pointed criticisms of game designs and mechanics, forcing new changes and sometimes even termination of a game concept that just doesn't work, something Knizia confesses to doing on a regular basis. “One challenge is falling in love with one's game. One needs to see the reality of it – this is nice, but there are some problems we can't overcome, so we need to kill the game.”</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/reiner-games.jpg" alt="" title="reiner-games" width="550" height="242" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-79969" /></p>
<p>Game design involves both the creative side, coming up with the theme and concept, and the mechanical side, determining exactly how the game will be played, including the balance of chance and skill. Knizia himself says he sits somewhere in the middle, but also views himself as a “moderator” of the group at his small game-design outfit, nurturing ideas and directing conversations to constructive ends.</p>
<p>Donald X. Vaccarino, designer of the highly popular card game Dominion, told me that most board game enthusiasts are “math people” at heart, but Knizia wasn't sure he'd agree with that. “When I look at audience, games are played by all representations of different people, and with respect to game design I'm not so sure either. What I enjoy is that people are brought together by the love for games from many different designers, like a big group of different colorful birds … This is good. It gives us a big variety of games.” As for whether you need math skills to design a game, he cautioned, “It would be dangerous to say you have to be a mathematician. It's a good background” - Knizia himself has a Ph.D. in mathematics - “but we all have strengths and weaknesses. If you say math is the only way I can do this, I think you will fail. You need to take yourself back and say, 'Do the math models help me?' I'm pushing games I think are fun.”</p>
<p>Knizia is German by birth and while he lives and works in England now, Germany remains the major market for the style of game Knizia designs, although the U.S. market is developing. He says there remains a significant difference in how consumers and publishers in the two markets view games. “In America, the game is much more defined by its theme, whereas in Germany the game is defined through its mechanics. Many years ago, I was in America and I showed a new game design and it was an Egyptian game.” (Knizia didn't specify the game, although his Egyptian-themed game Ra has been very successful.) “I was told, 'No, we already have an Egyptian game,' and they wouldn't play it at all. Just a few weeks later I was in Germany, showed the game to a publisher who said, 'We have a similar game – but let us see your game first.' It's completely fine to use the same mechanics in America where you just put another theme on it. In Germany the critics will kill you for that because it's just the same game.”</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/samurai.jpg" alt="" title="samurai" width="275" height="183" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-79968" />One thing that sets Knizia's design group apart from others is that he has moved aggressively to license games for iOS, with roughly a dozen Knizia titles available on iPhones and iPads (including my personal favorite, <a href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/?p=1579">Samurai</a>). He recognizes what only a few other designers have – that given the relatively high price ($20-40) of these German-style board games, a $5 app can be the perfect gateway to introduce a player to the game's concept, potentially upselling him to the physical game later. </p>
<p>“People say, 'Oh there's a board game of this' - even though it was the other way around!” That kind of exposure in a market where reaching consumers through traditional channels has been difficult is invaluable, and Knizia's titles, which tend to involve simple rules that play out in complex ways, have translated very well to the small screen.</p>
<p>So why board games, other than the fact that designing them beats a typical office job? “Games are one of the great leisure activities,” says Knizia. “It doesn't matter how old you are or what background – we are here in this game together.”</p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">January 18, 2011 - 11:15am</span></span>
</span>Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:15:02 +0000Keith Law26896 at http://mentalfloss.comCard Game World Domination: The Rise of 'Dominion'http://mentalfloss.com/article/26635/card-game-world-domination-rise-dominion
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: </div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/dominion_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Most of the highly regarded “German-style” board games on the market today are true board games, with physical boards that are either set up at the game's start or built as the game goes along. Very few card-based games grace the top end of the BoardGameGeek top 100, while most of the games that are there are relatively complex strategy games. And the majority of those games were authored, as you might guess, by German game designers. One glaring exception is the card-based game <em>Dominion</em>, designed by U.S.-born Donald X. Vaccarino. Since <em>Dominion</em> won the coveted Spiel des Jahres award in 2009, it's become a global success, selling more than 300,000 copies worldwide in 19 languages and spawning four separate expansions.</p>
<!--more--><p>The concept behind <em>Dominion</em> is simple, a major reason it has crossed over to the point where you can find it in a mainstream store like Barnes &amp; Noble. Each player starts out with a deck of ten cards, seven treasure cards (used to buy other cards) and three Estate victory cards (worth one point apiece at the end of the game). Constantly shuffling and dealing cards from his own deck, each player builds up his deck by buying action cards, more treasure cards, and eventually more victory cards, with the goal of acquiring the most victory points when the game ends – usually when the pile of Province victory cards (worth six points apiece) is exhausted. It is extremely easy to learn, and the wide variety of action cards – 25 in the base set, with only ten used in any specific game – leads to a number of possible strategies and an absurd number of variations on the game. (There are over 3.2 million possible combinations of ten action cards you can draw from those 25 options, and the expansions bring the total number of possible combinations to over 17 trillion.)</p>
<p>Vaccarino designed <em>Dominion</em> over the course of a weekend, because he had a game night coming up that Monday and the game he'd been working on – an expansion for a fantasy-themed cards-and-dice game called Spirit Warriors – wasn't close to ready. He'd had the idea for <em>Dominion</em> six months earlier, but only sat down to work on implementing it on that weekend in October of 2006, banging out the prototype in “a few hours, including Googling up art” for the initial set of cards. </p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dominion-cards.jpg" alt="" title="dominion-cards" width="490" height="184" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-76878" /></p>
<p>The beauty of <em>Dominion</em>, according to Vaccarino, is that it solves the problem of other card-based games, where an action card is played and either discarded or sits in play for the rest of the game. When you play a card in <em>Dominion</em>, it goes into your discard pile and is eventually reshuffled back into your deck, to be used again at some point in the next handful of turns. That feature keeps gameplay simple: You are never confronted with too many decisions, or forced to keep track of too many things going on in front of you or across the board. You draw five cards from your deck each turn, and your decisions are limited to the cards in your hand. Not only does that keep the game simple, it keeps it moving, so no one is ever sitting around waiting for too long.</p>
<p>Another elegantly simple game mechanic is that on every turn, a player can play one Action card and make one purchase, called a Buy. He can play an action card that gives him more actions, or more buys, or the right to draw more cards, but the foundation of each turn is one Action, one Buy, and the Cleanup phase, where the player puts all cards from that turn on his discard pile and draws a fresh hand of five from his deck.</p>
<p>Vaccarino says that the only major decision he faced when designing the game was determining how players would be able to buy action cards. Most card games leave the player's choice of cards up to the randomness of a central deck of set of decks: You get what you draw. Maybe you can put a card back and draw a new one, but there's both a strong element of randomness and the possibility of imbalance involved in any such system: You draw a mediocre card, revealing a better one for me. While mulling over options for improving this particular game mechanic, Vaccarino decided to punt on the decision temporarily, placing all ten action cards out on the table and allowing players to choose any of them that they liked, using their one Buy opportunity per turn. “That way,” Vaccarino says, “if a card was broken I'd find out right away. Well, of course we liked just buying whatever we wanted and so I never did replace it.” <em>Dominion</em> still features that open-market concept: Any player can buy any card at any time as long as he has sufficient treasure cards in his hand and the pile of that particular card is not exhausted.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/dominion-bgg.jpg" alt="" title="dominion-bgg" width="502" height="405" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-76874" /></p>
<p><em>[Image courtesy of EndersGame at <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/356227/a-comprehensive-pictorial-overview">boardgamegeek.com</a>]</em></p>
<p>Vaccarino found that <em>Dominion</em> was so popular with his friends that he decided to try to find a publisher, eventually showing the game (along with several others) to Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande Games at the Origins Game Fair in 2007. Tummelson agreed to publish the game after several play-testers loved it, eventually breaking down Vaccarino's large set of cards into what is now the base set and several expansions.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/jahres.jpg" alt="" title="jahres" width="250" height="187" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-76879" /><em>Dominion</em> debuted in 2008 and was a near-immediate success, winning the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (“Game of the Year”), boosting its European sales dramatically and giving it a chance to trickle into the more stolid American gaming mainstream. Vaccarino says he wasn't shocked that the game was a hit, because everyone who played the game before it was released “adored it … the people who'd played it weren't some special sampling of the population that adored garbage.” He says he'd always hoped that <em>Dominion</em> would have its own shelf at the game store, the way that <em>Settlers of Catan</em> and <em>Carcassonne</em> each have their own shelves containing the original game and its myriad expansions. Having seen <em>Dominion</em> and its expansions in book and game stores, I think his dream is well on its way to fruition.</p>
<p>As for his post-<em>Dominion</em> plans, Vaccarino says he has other games in the pipeline. “In interviews people will ask me, 'What do you do for a living?' And I always say, 'Right now I make <em>Dominion</em> expansions, but one day I hope to be a game designer.' It's the truth! I have some older games I'd still like published, and I'm making new games. I have two games lined up to be published currently ... I have other games waiting for me to submit them to publishers, or waiting for publishers to look at them.”?</p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">December 15, 2010 - 7:47am</span></span>
</span>Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:47:21 +0000Keith Law26635 at http://mentalfloss.comSettlers of Catan: Monopoly Killer?http://mentalfloss.com/article/26416/settlers-catan-monopoly-killer
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: </div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/settlers_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>As a baseball writer who discusses the economic aspects of the game, I'm often pushed by the “it's just a game” portion of the audience to defend my own position that baseball is, at heart, a business like any other. Owners and the league are in it to make money, either through profit or increasing the value of their teams, and the league is subject to competition from other sports and shocks from inside and outside the industry. The same is true of board gaming, which has had to fight changing consumer tastes and deal with the effects of technology, from the Internet to home video gaming systems. </p>
<p>The boardgaming world was, however, been pretty stolid for the bulk of the 20th century, with very little innovation from within; the mainstream board gaming companies' idea of creativity is coming up with themed versions of existing stalwart games. But in 1995, the game <i>Wired</i> magazine dubbed the <a href="http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_settlers">"Monopoly killer"</a> (although Monopoly isn't dead … yet) entered the market, and after a long, slow incubation period, is moving into the mainstream and threatening the established order of board games.</p>
<p>
This game was developed in Germany, the center of the boardgaming universe; Germans buy more board games per capita than any other nation, and the vast majority of what are now called “German-style” games come from the market that gave the genre its name. (A bit circular, but the center holds.) </p>
<!--more--><p>It was developed by Klaus Teuber, a dental technician who had previously won the prestigious Spiel des Jahres (“Game of the Year”) award three times but didn't have any long-term successes. In 1991, he had the idea for a game where players competed to colonize a newly discovered island, a game that would be competitive, incorporate some element of chance, and would be fairly easy for new players to learn. It took him four years of tinkering and testing the game with his wife and two children before he released it to the public in 1995.</p>
<p>The game was Settlers of Catan, and while it hasn't killed off the old boardgames that still lead the market, it has led a minor revolution in the gaming world.</p>
<p>If you haven't been introduced to the joys of Catan, you are in a shrinking majority, as the game is now available through such mainstream vendors as Target and Barnes &amp; Noble and ranks as the #1 selling strategy game on Amazon. As Teuber intended, the game combines skill and luck with a simple set of rules where no player is ever eliminated. It's infinitely replayable, and has even become a cult hit among <a href="online.wsj.com/article/SB126092289275692825.html">Silicon Valley executives</a>.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/settlers2.jpg" alt="" title="settlers2" width="500" height="366" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74587" /></p>
<p>In the original version, which requires three or four players, the island of Catan comprises 19 hexagonal tiles, randomly arranged in a large hexagon with three tiles per side. Eighteen of those tiles are resource tiles, with one of the five resources in Catan (wool, ore, wood, brick/clay, and wheat) and a number between 2 and 12. The nineteenth tile is a desert tile with no resources. </p>
<p>Players begin the game by placing two settlements on the vertices of the hexagons, going for specific resource combinations and tiles with numbers closer to 7. Each player begins his/her turn by rolling the two dice, and any tile bearing a number equal to the combined total of the rolls yields one resource per adjoining settlement and two per city to the players who own them. Players use specific combinations of resources to build roads and settlements, convert settlements to cities, or buy cards that allow them to raise an army or earn points. The winner is the first player to get to 10 victory points, achieved through settlements (1 apiece), cities (2 apiece), building the longest continuous road (2 points), raising the largest army (2 points), or through special one-point cards scattered through the deck.</p>
<p>The game's random elements come through the dice and the deck of cards, with special value on the most likely roll of the dice. When a player rolls a 7, he may move the robber on to any tile on the board, blocking one or more opponents from earning more resources until the robber moves, stealing one resource from an opponent, and forcing any player with more than seven resources on hand to discard half of them. Players may also move the robber by playing a soldier card, regardless of the dice roll. Thus an opponent who threatens to run away with the game may find himself targeted by other players who seek to slow his progress.</p>
<p>The U.S. market for the game has picked up substantially over the past few years, and Mayfair, the game's publisher and manufacturer, believes they're about five years from a true breakout. They shipped their one millionth copy of the game in January of 2010, and now print the game continuously (most games are printed like books, in batches according to demand). By 2013, Mayfair hopes to ship over a million copies a year here, up tenfold over their 2004 sales figure, as the game continues to seep into the mainstream consciousness alongside such ntries as Monopoly or Risk – games that involve more luck, less strategy, and involve eliminating opponents. </p>
<p>The slow build of Settlers of Catan over the last 15 years has opened the door for other, smarter games by creating a niche for serious board gamers. Walk into Barnes &amp; Noble and you'll find several shelves of German-style games, including Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Dominion, all later winners of the Spiel des Jahres. In addition to smarter game mechanics, these games boast better-quality boards and pieces, and all four of these titles offer multiple expansions for players who want to add something to the core gameplay, such as The Seafarers of Catan, Carcassonne Traders &amp; Builders, or Dominion: Alchemy. </p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/strategy-games.jpg" alt="" title="strategy-games" width="550" height="250" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74583" /></p>
<p>And there's even a niche within the niche of gamers who find Settlers too simple or too luck-driven, a group that drives the top of the rankings over at <a href="http://boardgamegeek.com/">BoardGameGeek</a>, where more demanding, almost no-luck games like Puerto Rico, Agricola, and the epic Caylus (games of which can last six hours “if you're quick,” according to one industry exec with whom I spoke) dominate the site's Top 100 ranking.</p>
<p>Settlers was my own introduction to German-style games, and it renewed my long-dormant interest in board games. I noticed it had earned induction into the <i>GAMES Magazine</i> Hall of Fame in 2005, the only game in that pantheon with which I wasn't familiar, so I sought it out – first the two-player card game, then the original board game, then the Seafarers expansion. Our own collection now numbers over 25 German-style games plus a few expansions, but Settlers will always remain a favorite because of its blend of simplicity and strategy and the way that it ensures no two games are ever alike.</p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">November 18, 2010 - 9:21am</span></span>
</span>Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:21:28 +0000Keith Law26416 at http://mentalfloss.comThe Origins of 8 Classic Board Gameshttp://mentalfloss.com/article/26405/origins-8-classic-board-games
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: <a href="/section/top-story" class="author-writes-about-link">top-story</a></div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/backgammon_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>Continuing our look at the <a href="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/74055">history</a> <a href="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/74067">of</a> board games, here are the histories of some more modern classic games, from backgammon to Scrabble to Hex.</em></p>
<h4>1. Backgammon</h4>
<p>Other than chess – the history of which is well-covered elsewhere – the most enduring table game of the last few centuries is backgammon, also known as “tables” early in its history. </p>
<!--more--><p>Backgammon itself is a descendant, at least in spirit if not in direct lineage, of the games of Senet and Ur that I discussed <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/74055">earlier this week</a>. The missing link may be the Middle Eastern game Nard or Nardshir, with rules nearly identical to backgammon's and appearances in Babylonian and Persian literature between 300 and 850 A.D.; when the Arabs conquered Persia in the 6th century, the game spread throughout the Muslim world, moving up the Caucasus and into Central Asia as well as Spain, from which it headed further into Europe. Willard Fiske, author of the misnamed <i>Chess in Iceland</i> (which includes histories of many table games beyond chess), argues for Nard as the connection between tables/backgammon and the table games of antiquity, while David Parlett identifies its entry into Europe as Tabl?, later Tabula, by way of the Byzantine Empire and then Greece. Tabula first appears in literature through an epigram written by the Byzantine Emperor Zeno, who lamented a particularly unfortunate throw of the dice in verse that was reproduced several decades later by the Greek poet Agathias.</p>
<p>An early variant of Tables, called Tick-Tack (derived from the game tric-trac, where the goal was achieving certain scores or positions rather than bearing off all of one's pieces), even earns mention in Shakespeare's <i>Measure for Measure</i>, as Lucio says to Claudius in response to the latter's plea for Lucio to talk to Claudius' nunnery-bound sister: “I pray she may; as well for the encouragement of the like, which else would stand under grievous imposition, as for the enjoying of thy life, who I would be sorry should be thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack. I'll to her.”</p>
<p>The term “backgammon” itself first appears in 1645, spelled “baggammon,” in a letter that also referred to Irish, a simpler predecessor that didn't include doubles or the levels of winning found in the modern game.</p>
<h4>2. Othello</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/othello.jpg" alt="" title="othello" width="500" height="332" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74466" /></p>
<p>Popular today under the trademarked name Othello, the game previously called Reversi predates the Othello brand name by more than a half-century, but the name Reversi fell into the public domain several decades after its invention and publication. The inventor of Reversi remains in dispute; the original patent went to Briton Lewis Waterman in 1888, but he was later accused of theft by James Mollett, whose Annexation game purportedly dated to 1870. Othello differs from Reversi only in name, in starting placement (in Reversi the first four pieces go in the center, but not necessarily in the familiar diagonal pattern), and in origin myth, as Othello was “invented” in Japan in the 1960s by Goro Hasegawa.</p>
<h4>3. Risk</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/risk.jpg" alt="" title="risk" width="500" height="267" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74474" /></p>
<p>Risk was first published in France in 1957 as La Conquete du Monde, or “World Conquest,” the name under which Parker Brothers first published it in the United Statees. The game was invented by Oscar- and Palme d'Or-winning film director Albert Lamorisse, who was also the author of the children's book <i>The Red Balloon</i>, adapted from his Academy Award-winning short film of that name. Game historian Bruce Whitehill has written that the choice of the Risk name reflected the first initials of the four grandchildren of the company salesman who suggested the name, although the story seems to be apocryphal.</p>
<h4>4. Diplomacy</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/diplomacy.jpg" alt="" title="diplomacy" width="499" height="299" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74475" /></p>
<p>Diplomacy, tabbed by one gamer friend of mine as “Risk for grown-ups,” was developed by Allan Calhamer in the early 1950s but was not published until 1959, when Calhamer decided to print it himself after existing game houses weren't interested. A favorite of John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Cronkite, the game has sold over 300,000 copies since its 1960 publication by Games Research, and the game has endured the vicissitudes of the game-publishing industry, going to 3M, Avalon Hill, and now Hasbro. Calhamer, a Harvard graduate, drifted through law school and a few other jobs before <a href="http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2009/All-in-the-Game/">settling on a career as a postal worker</a>. He never published another game. </p>
<p>Part of the brilliance of Diplomacy is that it involves no luck whatsoever. Seven players (no more, no fewer) represent seven great powers in Europe at 1900. They must form and break alliances with each other to try to be the one player left at the end who controls the majority of the 34 spaces on the map of the continent. The game relies entirely on negotiations and player strategy, with numerous strategy guides abounding online, including an entire Wikipedia article on a popular opening sequence for Italy called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepanto_opening">the Lepanto opening</a>. One of a handful of games (with Risk) in both the <i>GAMES Magazine</i> and Origin Awards Halls of Fame, Diplomacy is an excellent choice if you enjoy knife fights with your friends and holding grudges that last well beyond the final move.</p>
<h4>5. Checkers</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/checkers.jpg" alt="" title="checkers" width="500" height="226" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74477" /></p>
<p>The game known today as checkers or draughts likely traces back to Alquerque, a game that first appears in a 1283 treatise by Alfonso the Wise, summarizing the state of dice, table, and board games in that era. The “de doze” variety of Alquerque, where each player began with twelve pieces, was played on a five-by-five grid, with only the central space unoccupied at the opening. A player moves by sliding any piece horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to an adjacent, vacant space, or by jumping over an opponent's piece to a vacant space, thereby capturing the piece he jumped. The game could, and arguably should, end in a draw, as there is no luck involved and the second player can always simply counter the first's moves. Alquerque, found throughout southwestern Europe from Sicily to France to Catalonia. </p>
<p>Alquerque itself was related to the games known collectively as “merels,” from the Latin <i>merellus</i> meaning a token or game piece. Parlett asserts that merels were viewed on par with chess and tables by the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, where the wealthy could afford the specially-designed boards required for these games, often owning two-sided boards to allow for the play of two of the three games. Merels were two-player games where each player is trying to line up three of his pieces in a row, a style of game largely fallen into disuse but recognizable in Tic-Tac-Toe (also known as “noughts and crosses” in the U.K.) and the 1970s staple Connect Four.</p>
<h4>6. Scrabble</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/scrabble.jpg" alt="" title="scrabble" width="500" height="495" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74478" /></p>
<p>In 1938, architect Alfred M. Butts revised his own word-tile game, Lexiko, calling the new version Criss-Cross Words and – stop me if you've heard this before – found his idea rejected by the game-publishing establishment. (Among those rejecting it: Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and Simon &amp; Schuster.) When early demand proved more than he could handle while holding down a full-time government job and some freelance work as an architect, Butts sought a publisher, eventually selling the rights to James Brunot, executive director of the President's War Relief Council, in exchange for a royalty on future game sales; Brunot tweaked the board, retitled the game Scrabble, and lost money for three years before his fortunes turned. </p>
<p>For reasons lost to history, sales started to increase radically in the summer of 1952, led by a large order from Macy's. From sales of just 1632 units in 1950 – a drop of about 33% from 1949 – Scrabble moved just under 3.8 <i>million</i> copies in 1954, by which point Brunot had licensed the game to Selchow &amp; Righter. If you're interested in Scrabble, I highly recommend Stefan Fatsis' entertaining history of both the game and his own obsessive efforts in the world of competitive Scrabble players, <i>Word Freak</i>.</p>
<h4>7. Hex</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/hex.jpg" alt="" title="hex" width="500" height="311" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74480" /></p>
<p>One entire class of games that has largely disappeared since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s is connection games — largely abstract games where players would try to capture areas or block opponents' paths by connecting disparate points on a board of lines or pegs. The best-known example is Hex, invented independently in the 1940s by two mathematicians: Piet Hein of Denmark, and John Nash of the United States and <i>A Beautiful Mind</i> fame. (Parlett actually gets this one wrong, referring to Hein as “a Princeton University student,” conflating the two men.) </p>
<p>First commercialized in 1952 by Parker Brothers, who gave it the name “Hex,” the underlying game is played on a board of variable size but equal length and width where the game spaces are hexagonal, thus each bordering six adjacent spaces. The players play at perpendicular angles to each other, and each player's goal is to connect from his side to the opposite side. Nash proved that the game is a determined game: There can be no tie or draw, as the only conclusion is when one player completes a path between two opposite sides of the board.</p>
<h4>8. TwixT</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/twixt.jpg" alt="" title="twixt" width="500" height="346" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74481" /></p>
<p>TwixT, now out of print, was invented by Alex Randolph in 1962 and published by 3M as part of its “bookshelf games” series a decade later. TwixT's board is a 24x24 grid of holes, where each player places pegs to connect to his pegs already on the board. The only permitted placement mimics that of a chess player's knight – two holes in one direction, then a 90-degree turn and shift of one more hole. The goal of TwixT, as in Hex, is to connect from one side to the other, but in TwixT the chain would be a series of pegs and connectors. TwixT, unlike Hex, is in GAMES Magazine's Hall of Fame, but is not commercially available, as the rights went to Hasbro when the company purchased legendary board game publisher Avalon Hill.</p>
<p><em><strong>Tomorrow:</strong> <a href="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/74575">Settlers of Catan</a>.</em></p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">November 17, 2010 - 1:44pm</span></span>
</span>Wed, 17 Nov 2010 23:44:59 +0000Keith Law26405 at http://mentalfloss.com5000 Years of Board Games (Part Two)http://mentalfloss.com/article/26389/5000-years-board-games-part-two
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: </div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/nyout_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>This week, Keith Law is taking us though the evolution of board games. If you missed yesterday's installment, you might want to <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/74055">read that first</a>.</em></p>
<p>While modern western board games trace their lineage through Europe to the Middle East, Asia has its own long history of board games, dating at least back to 300 A.D., where we find the earliest references to a Korean game called Nyout, first described in English by Stewart Culin in 1895. Nyout, one of the earliest of a style of game now known somewhat pejoratively as “roll the dice, move your mice” games, involved a game board with a circular track circumscribing a cross, where the goal for any player was to have his or her pieces (called “horses”) make complete circuits around the outer track. Horses can be captured by another player's horses should they land on an occupied space. Although the game itself is Korean, Culin argued that its roots were Chinese, and early Nyout boards included Chinese characters. Within Korea, the game was associated with gambling and considered plebeian.</p>
<!--more--><p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/go.jpg" alt="" title="go" width="500" height="385" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74229" /></p>
<p>Go (I-go) is a classic Japanese game of placement, originally known in China as wéiqí, and is described by Parlett as the oldest extant board game in the world, with its rules nearly unchanged for several thousand years. In go, each player places stones with an eye toward surrounding as much space as possible. While the earliest reference to wéiqí appears in 548 B.C., the game's popularity in China soared during the T'ang dynasty of 618 to 906 A.D., as Taoism rose in importance. [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Go-Equipment-Narrow-Black.png">Image credit</a>.]</p>
<p>A similar traditional game called mig-mang or ming-mang, meaning “many eyes,” is played in Tibet; the board is 16x16 and all pieces start on the perimeter, with each player occupying two adjacent sides of the square.</p>
<p>Wéiqí moved to Korea some time in the second century B.C., when the Han Dynasty expanded into the Korean peninsula, where the game, called baduk, remains extremely popular. Go arrived in Japan in the 5th or 6th century A.D., and by the end of the first millennium was an essential part of Japanese culture, factoring strongly in two great Japanese novels of widely different eras: <i>The Tale of Genji</i>, which was written around 1000 A.D.; and <i>The Master of Go</i>, written in 1951 by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata.</p>
<p>Go became a favorite game of the learned classes of medieval Japan, as well as of warlords and military tacticians. When Tokugawa Ieyasu became Shogun in 1603, he created a government office for the regulation and development of go (as well as one for shogi, or Japanese chess). His first principal, Honinbo Sansa, also known by his Buddhist name of Nikkai, established a nationwide system of rules and four major go “houses” or academies, one of which, the eponymous Honinbo, lasted until 1940.</p>
<p>At first glance, the go board resembles a super-sized version of Reversi, but go is played on the vertices of a 19 by 19 square surface, and pieces are captured not through a line but by surrounding them on four sides, or on two or three sides at the board's extreme corner or edge. Any piece that is not yet surrounded by the opponent's color is said to have “liberty,” and thus the object is to take liberties from – rather than with – one's opponent. Due to its simple rules, zero-sum nature, and extremely high number of legal game positions – about 2.08 x 10170, roughly the estimated minimum number of atoms in the known universe <i>squared</i> – go has attracted attention from mathematicians and game theorists, and even led to the creation of an arithmetic continuum called the surreal numbers.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/parcheesi.jpg" alt="" title="parcheesi" width="500" height="326" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74225" /></p>
<p>In India, Pachisi – bastardized in name and form for westerners as “Parcheesi” - is considered the national board game, due to its long history and mention in the Sanskrit epic the <i>Mahabharata</i>. The name Pachisi comes from the Hindi word “pachis,” meaning twenty-five, the highest possible score that a player can achieve by throwing the cowrie shells used as a sort of binary dice. [Image credit: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parcheesi-board.jpg">Micha L. Rieser</a>.]</p>
<p>The game board resembles the cross found on Parcheesi boards, but pachisi is a four-player game involving two partnerships, as in bridge. Players attempt to move their pieces around the entire perimeter of the board and back into the board's center, with victory going to the partnership that has all eight of its pieces complete the route first. The board is similar to that of Nyout, and Parlett theorizes that the games may have shared a common ancestor. </p>
<p>Chaupar is a more complex variant of pachisi using different dice substitutes and giving players more flexibility in using the results of their rolls; chaupar was seen as the rich man's game, while pachisi was the peasants', although the popularity of both games has declined in India in the past century. Further simplified versions of the game called Ludo and Sorry! have found commercial success in the West, although they bear only a superficial resemblance to their grandparent.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/mancala.jpg" alt="" title="mancala" width="500" height="400" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74226" /></p>
<p>The most popular game, or more properly style of game, in traditional African cultures is mancala. The game's name is derived from the Arabic word naqala ('to move'), where two players attempt to capture neutral pieces from a playing board of two tracks of cups or containers. Like go and mig-mang, mancala games involve no luck or chance, but unlike contestants at go, mancala players move quickly. The earliest Western reference to mancala came nearly 500 years ago, although the game is likely much older than that, with mancala-like boards appearing in Egyptian temples and pyramids, on Neolithic tablets found in Kenya, and in once-fertile areas of the Sahara that may date back to 3000 B.C. </p>
<p>Although hundreds of varieties exist up and down the continent and wherever African slaves were taken, including Wari/Woro of West Africa and the Caribbean and Endodoi of Kenya and Tanzania, the basic principle involves taking all of the stones in one hole/cup and moving them forward, dropping (or 'sowing') one stone per cup. The rules for capturing the stones in any cup vary depending on the game, but may depend on how many stones were in the cup at the point of sowing, or whether the cup across from it was empty, but the objective remains the capture of the majority of the pieces on the board.</p>
<p><em><strong>Tomorrow:</strong> Backgammon, Scrabble, and more!</em></p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">November 16, 2010 - 9:31am</span></span>
</span>Tue, 16 Nov 2010 19:31:35 +0000Keith Law26389 at http://mentalfloss.com5000 Years of Board Games (Part One)http://mentalfloss.com/article/26379/5000-years-board-games-part-one
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: </div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/senet_6.jpg" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Board games — whether games of chance, skill, or a little of both — have been found in many human cultures dating back at least 5000 years. <strong>Over the next five days, I'll take you on a quick tour though the evolution of board games, from their earliest forms in the cradles of civilization to the exciting rebirth of the boardgame bursting out of Germany over the last fifteen years. </strong></p>
<p>The <i>Oxford History of Board Games</i> by David Parlett was an invaluable resource in assembling this series of articles, covering a substantial amount of ground in a mere 300 pages; it is sadly out of print, and a little out of date as the industry has changed since its publication, but I found a copy in the local library system here in Arizona and would recommend giving it a skim if you're looking for more detail.</p>
<p>The oldest board game currently known is from ancient Egypt, called Senet (s'n't in Egyptian texts, but spelled “senet” today). References to the game appear as early as the thirtieth century B.C. Archaeologists have found freestanding Senet boards as well as boards built into gaming tables. The board comprised thirty squares in three rows of ten, at least five of which were adorned with symbols or hieroglyphs that may have indicated a special function, always including the final space and the space halfway between the presumed start and finish. Each player would have five to seven pieces, a number that seemed to settle at five after a few centuries of variation, with each player's pieces all of one design, often ornate carvings of animals or demons. </p>
<!--more--><p>The precise rules are unknown, but historians including Parlett speculate (based on ancient drawings) that the objective was to advance your pieces along the board through all 30 spaces, with movement coming from the casting of four two-sided tokens. In his <i>Sports and Games of Ancient Egypt</i>, Wolfgang Decker speculates that square fifteen, which contained a hieroglyph meaning 'rebirth,' had special meaning, but square 27, which contained a symbol for a pool of water, sent the token landing there back to the rebirth square. Egyptologist Timothy Kendall, formerly of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, has proposed an entire set of rules that is now used as the basis for various editions of the game, publishing them in 1978 as <i>Passing through the netherworld: The meaning and play of senet, an ancient Egyptian funerary game</i>. [Image credit: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P9210016.JPG">deror avi</a>.] </p>
<p>Another Egyptian game, Mehen (or Snake), is the earliest known example of linear-track games, where players attempt to move their pieces from one end of the board's track to the other, often using tricks or shortcuts. Mehen was depicted in the tomb of the Egyptian physician and scribe Hesy-ra, in a picture with Senet and a third game called M'n, about which almost nothing else is known. Unlike the rules of Senet, however, Mehen's game play is unknown, other than that the game pieces included 3 lions, 3 lionesses, and marble-like spheres associated with each lion or lioness. </p>
<p>Mehen is a possible ancestor of a game called Li'b el Marafib, or <a href="http://www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/Archives/Davies/heyna.html">The Hyena Game</a>, which appeared in Sudan among the Baggara Arabs and was played on a track drawn in the sand.</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/UR.jpg" alt="" title="UR" width="500" height="400" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-74065" /></p>
<p>Senet boards often had another game on the reverse side called the Game of Twenty, which bears a strong resemblance to a Mesopotamian game called The Royal Game of Ur. One of the earliest of a style of game called “bilateral race games” — two players, each moving pieces along a path or track, with the first player to get all his pieces to the end the victor — The Royal Game of Ur was (re)discovered by Sir Leonard Woolley in 1926-7 in the Royal Tombs of Ur, which included four gaming boards and the accompanying pieces. Players would flip three binary tokens — four-sided pyramids with the corners shaved and two of the four exposed surfaces colored — resulting in a total score from 0 to 3, which players used to move pieces along an asymmetrical board of twenty spaces. (A cuneiform tablet dating to 176 or 177 B.C. gave most of the rules.) The board includes certain spaces where pieces are immune to attack by the opponent, another feature that appears in many later games. The British Museum, whose Irving Finkel collects board game artifacts for the institution, offers a <a href="http://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/invt/cmcp76360/">boxed version of the game</a> and an <a href="http://www.mesopotamia.co.uk/tombs/challenge/cha_set.html">online version</a> (Shockwave required) as well.</p>
<p>Plato mentions two board games in <i>The Republic</i>, including a war game called Petteia, played on a square board; and Kubeia, which was either a specific game involving dice or the broader class of dice games. Both games, as with most games of Greece and Rome, appear now to descend from older games of Egypt, Ur, and Palestine, moving to Greece through Mediterranean island cultures and then to Rome after the latter's conquest of Greece. Several Roman writers mention other board games, notably Ludus Duodecim Scriptorum or the “twelve-line game,” which may be a precursor of modern backgammon, and may itself be a descendant of the Egyptian Game of Thirty (which differs from the Game of Twenty, as well as from the mysterious Game of Fifty-Eight Holes, played on a cribbage-like board but with unknown rules).</p>
<p><em><strong>Tomorrow:</strong> We're heading to Asia!</em></p>
<p><em>Keith Law of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss. Check out his <a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">blog</a> or follow him <a target="_blank" href="http://twitter.com/keithlaw">on Twitter</a>.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">November 15, 2010 - 10:02am</span></span>
</span>Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:02:33 +0000Keith Law26379 at http://mentalfloss.comOne Sweet Severance Package & Other Tales of the ABAhttp://mentalfloss.com/article/23170/one-sweet-severance-package-other-tales-aba
<div class="field-group-format group_meta field-group-div group-meta speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-enhanced-authors field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/authors/keith-law">Keith Law</a></div></div></div><div class="field-group-format group_categories field-group-div group-categories categories speed-none effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-category-url field-type-computed field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">filed under: <a href="/section/business" class="author-writes-about-link">business</a>, <a href="/section/entertainment" class="author-writes-about-link">entertainment</a>, <a href="/section/sports" class="author-writes-about-link">Sports</a></div></div></div></div></div><div class="primary-image">
<img src="http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/57698739.png" width="640" height="430" alt="" /> </div><div class="field-group-format group_image_credit field-group-div group-image-credit speed-fast effect-none"><div class="field field-name-field-image-credit field-type-text field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Image credit:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>wikimedia commons, fair use</p>
</div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em><strong>"The NBA was a symphony, it was scripted; the ABA was jazz."</strong> —Ron Grinker</em></p>
<p>Rival leagues were all the rage in North American sports in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but none has had as lasting an impact as the American Basketball Association. The ABA's six-year war with the NBA resulted in a merger that brought four new teams to the larger league, but also brought innovations, financial gains (and one big cost), and significant star power that permanently altered American professional basketball.</p>
<h4>The Spirits of St. Louis and Their Sweetheart Severance</h4>
<p>How does a team that never played a single NBA game—and never will—manage to get four-sevenths of an annual NBA TV share every year? With a good lawyer and a little luck.</p>
<!--more--><p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/st-louis-spirits.jpg" alt="st-louis-spirits" title="st-louis-spirits" width="200" height="145" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-39401" />The owners of the Spirits of St. Louis, the Silna brothers, had no intention of joining the NBA—in fact, had the ABA played its 1976-77 season, the brothers were moving the team to Salt Lake City—but they negotiated hard, demanding entry into the larger league and threatening to hold up the agreement until they were satisfied. The Spirits' attorney and part-owner Donald Schupak "just wore everyone out with his demands," according to Mike Goldberg, former legal counsel to the ABA.</p>
<p>In exchange for going along with an agreement that dissolved the Spirits but allowed four other ABA teams to join the NBA, the brothers received $2.2 million up front, and receive one-seventh of the TV money received by each of those four surviving ABA teams ... in perpetuity. (In practice, it has turned out to be slightly more than a four-seventh share, as the merger agreement specifies that their share may only be split across 28 teams. The NBA has 30 teams at the moment, so the brothers receive 30/49ths of a share.)</p>
<h2>In the NBA's current TV deal, that amounts to a $14.57 million check, every year, for doing nothing.</h2>
<p>Each brother gets 45%, and Schupark gets 10%. I imagine this lottery ticket is in the back of the mind of nearly every alternative-league owner who has come along since the ABA-NBA merger.</p>
<h4>The ABA Took on the NCAA, too—and Won</h4>
<p>The NCAA, always looking for ways to limit student-athletes' rights, had a "Four-Year Rule" that prohibited college players from leaving for pro careers until they had played four seasons for their schools. The ABA decided to challenge that rule, and the Denver Rockets signed a University of Detroit sophomore named Spencer Haywood to a three-year deal worth $450,000 (with most of the money deferred). They chose Haywood because he was dominating his college competition, but also because they could argue that he was a "hardship case" and needed to earn money to support his mother and nine siblings.</p>
<p>After a year of lawsuits, <strong>a judge ruled that the "Four-Year Rule" had no basis in law—similar to this February's ruling by an Ohio trial judge that the NCAA's by-law prohibiting players from using agents was invalid.</strong> Haywood was able to suit up for the Rockets, winning the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards before jumping ship and signing with the NBA's Seattle Sonics for more money.</p>
<h4>The ABA Had More Than Its Share of Hall of Famers</h4>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/dr-j-nets.jpg" alt="dr-j-nets" title="dr-j-nets" width="200" height="260" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-39404" />The ABA's destruction of the NCAA's rule preventing college players from leaving school early opened the door for the Virginia Squires to sign University of Massachusetts junior Julius Erving in 1970 as an undrafted free agent. (They paid the New York Nets $10,000 to settle a dispute over who had the rights to sign him.) Erving was a relatively unknown college player because college basketball at the time prohibited dunking, and dunking turned out to be the very thing that made Erving a legend, one later known as "Dr. J."</p>
<p>Erving was just the headliner among players who started their professional careers in the NBA. Fellow Hall of Famer Moses Malone played two seasons in the ABA, with Utah and St. Louis, before jumping to the NBA. George Gervin, also a Hall of Famer, started out with Virginia, moved to San Antonio, then stayed with the club as the Spurs joined the larger league. Rick Barry and Dan Issel both played in the ABA and ended up in the Hall of Fame. Larry Brown played in the ABA for five years, then began his coaching career there, eventually earning his way into the Hall of Fame as well. Seven-foot-two Art Gilmore made six NBA All-Star Games, and a dispute over his rights was the main reason the Kentucky Colonels (who were one of the top-drawing teams in the ABA, even outdrawing ten NBA teams on a per-game basis in 1974-75) were left out of the NBA in the merger agreement. In fact, despite always working as the smaller league, ten of the 24 players in the first post-merger All-Star Game had played in the ABA.</p>
<p>And while he never suited up—for obvious reasons—Bob Costas got his start in broadcasting as the radio play-by-play announcer for the Spirits of St. Louis.</p>
<h4>They Almost Merged Sooner</h4>
<p>The ABA's intention from the beginning was to force some kind of merger or other financial settlement with the NBA, and in the offseason between the 1969-70 and 1970-71 seasons, they nearly succeeded. The NBA had pooled its resources to keep several players out of the ABA, including Elvin Hayes and Wes Unseld, after which the ABA filed an antitrust suit. The ABA had written documentation of the NBA's plan to rig its entry draft, and used it to force settlement talks.</p>
<p>The NBA at the time didn't sign underclassmen, leaving that group of players entirely to the ABA, triggering another set of lawsuits but also pushing the NBA to come up with such a plan to prevent a talent drain. This gave the ABA substantial leverage in their negotiations with the NBA.</p>
<p>The reason the merger failed, according to ABA co-founder and legal counsel Dick Tinkham, was that the players opposed it. <strong>Oscar Robertson led a Players Association lawsuit that argued that the merger would create a monopoly (technically, a monopsony—a single-buyer market for the services of players) and thus artificially restrict player salaries and flexibility.</strong> The U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee held a heading where Robertson and John Havlicek testified - no word on whether Havlicek stole the gavel - and the committee's terms for approving the merger were unacceptable to the NBA, scotching the deal.</p>
<h4>They Presaged Expansion/Relocation</h4>
<p>The four teams that jumped from the NBA to the ABA (Denver, Indiana, San Antonio, and New Jersey) weren't the only changes made to the NBA map, as the ABA placed franchises in several other cities that eventually housed NBA teams.</p>
<p>Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, Salt Lake City, Memphis, and Miami all hosted ABA franchises at some point in the league's history. Charlotte hosted some of the Carolina Cougars' home games, along with three other cities in North Carolina. And San Diego proved a flop in the ABA, which didn't deter the owners of the Buffalo Braves from moving the team to San Diego in 1978, renaming them the Clippers, only to move north to Los Angeles after flopping in San Diego too (although the team's lousy performance was probably the main reason).</p>
<p><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/utah-stars.jpg" alt="utah-stars" title="utah-stars" width="250" height="95" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-39416" />The Utah Stars showed the viability of an NBA team in Salt Lake City, with a first-year attendance average of 6,246 fans, setting a record for a new franchise in either the ABA or the NBA. The Stars lasted until early in the ABA's final season—even averaging over 8,500 fans per game in their final full year—but owner Bill Daniels ran out of cash and the Stars folded just 16 games into the 1975-76 season after missing payroll. The NBA finally took advantage of the fertile market four years later, when the New Orleans Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, creating one of the most absurd team names in American professional sports.</p>
<h4>More ABA Nuggets</h4>
<p>George Mikan agreed to be the commissioner of the new league ten minutes before the introductory press conference, when owners finally capitulated to his demands (a three-year, $150,000 deal). Mikan's major contribution, other than the credibility he brought to the endeavor? The red, white, and blue ball. According to Terry Pluto's <em>Loose Balls</em>, over 30 million red, white, and blue balls were sold. Mikan also championed the three-point line, an idea taken from the defunct American Basketball League.</p>
<p>Of course, Mikan also may have torched the league's best chance to achieve some measure of equality with the NBA by botching negotiations with UCLA star Lew Alcindor—better known today as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—in a story recently <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/book/091023">recounted on ESPN.com by Bill Simmons</a>.<br />
*<br /><img src="http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/oaks.jpg" alt="oaks" title="oaks" width="200" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-39410" />Pat Boone was a part-owner of the Oakland Oaks franchise, and helped the team recruit disgruntled San Francisco Warriors star Rick Barry away from the NBA. Barry had to sit out the ABA's first season after a judge ruled in favor of the Warriors by upholding the "reserve clause" in NBA contracts, the same type of language challenged by baseball's Curt Flood three years later.<br />
*<br />
The first president, Gary Davidson, was largely a figurehead, but ended up a key player in the founding of the World Football League in the 1970s, another alternate league that failed to achieve the ABA's result of a merger with the stronger rival.<br />
*<br />
According to <em>Loose Balls</em>, the ABA's franchise in Houston, the Mavericks, reportedly drew a crowd of just 89 fans for one home game. A "home" game for the Memphis Tams, held in Jackson, Mississippi, had an announced crowd of 465. <strong>Of course, attendance records from the ABA remain a bit dubious; Indianapolis reporter Dave Overpeck overheard the GM of the San Diego Conquistadors, Alex Groza, tell a staff member, "Oh, let's say the attendance is 1,764."</strong></p>
<p>For more on the ABA, check out Terry Pluto's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Loose-Balls-American-Basketball-Association/dp/141654061X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1257183334&amp;sr=8-1"><em>Loose Balls</em></a>, a biography of the league with quotes from players, coaches, executives, owners, broadcasters, lawyers, and writers.</p>
<p><em><a target="_blank" href="http://meadowparty.com/blog/">Keith Law</a> of <a target="_blank" href="http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=law_keith&amp;action=login&amp;appRedirect=http%3a%2f%2finsider.espn.go.com%2fespn%2fblog%2findex%3fname%3dlaw_keith">ESPN</a> is an occasional contributor to mental_floss.</em></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">November 2, 2009 - 3:20pm</span></span>
</span>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:20:18 +0000Keith Law23170 at http://mentalfloss.comName Baseball's Rookies of the Year (1999-2008)http://mentalfloss.com/quiz/13641/name-baseballs-rookies-year-1999-2008
<table id="quiz-view-table">
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Questions:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>1</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Available:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Always</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Pass rate:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>75 %</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Backwards navigation:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Forbidden</em></td></tr>
</table>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Voting for MLB's postseason awards is right around the corner, and for the first time, I have a vote on one of them—the National League's Cy Young Award. The Cy makes for a lousy quiz because of repeat winners, so let's try the Rookie of the Year Award. <strong>Can you name the last ten winners in each league (1999-2008)?</strong> And no, Edinson Volquez doesn't count, although I imagine he'll get a few more votes this year.</p>
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</div> <div class="field field-name-field-quiz-type field-type-computed field-label-above"><div class="field-label">quiz_type:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">namexiny</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-rich-title field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Rich Title:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Name Baseball's Rookies of the Year (1999-2008)</p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">Thursday, October 8, 2009 - 09:39</span></span>
</span>Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:39:00 +0000Jason13641 at http://mentalfloss.comName the Presidential Runners-Up (1900-Present)http://mentalfloss.com/quiz/13639/name-presidential-runners-1900-present
<table id="quiz-view-table">
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Questions:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>1</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Available:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Always</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Pass rate:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>75 %</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Backwards navigation:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Forbidden</em></td></tr>
</table>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>One of the more popular <em>mental_floss</em> quizzes (#3!) asks you to <a target="_blank" href="http://mentalfloss.com/quiz/quiz.php?q=217">name all the Presidents</a> of the United States. But what about the runners-up? Can you name all 25 men who finished second in U.S. Presidential Elections dating back to 1900? (For people who finished second multiple times, you only need to enter them once. The list includes six Presidents.)</p>
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</div> <div class="field field-name-field-quiz-type field-type-computed field-label-above"><div class="field-label">quiz_type:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">namexiny</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-rich-title field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Rich Title:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Name the Presidential Runners-Up (1900-Present)</p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">Wednesday, October 7, 2009 - 09:30</span></span>
</span>Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:30:00 +0000Jason13639 at http://mentalfloss.comName the Most Popular Indo-European Languageshttp://mentalfloss.com/quiz/13635/name-most-popular-indo-european-languages
<table id="quiz-view-table">
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Questions:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>1</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Available:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Always</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Pass rate:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>75 %</em></td></tr>
<tr><td class="quiz-view-table-title"><strong>Backwards navigation:</strong></td><td class="quiz-view-table-data"><em>Forbidden</em></td></tr>
</table>
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>One of my hobbies is—or was, before my daughter was born and I had infinite free time—learning foreign languages, usually just to the conversational level for use while traveling. Most of the time I stick to Indo-European languages, since they nearly all have a little bit in common with English. <strong>There are 12 languages in the Indo-European family with at least 50 million native speakers. How many can you name in 3 minutes?</strong></p>
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<span class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - 09:44</span></span>
</span>Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:44:00 +0000Jason13635 at http://mentalfloss.com